My Travel Muse: My Grandma
Summer 1989 - My Grandma, Ramona Shaw, on her first trip to France. She is standing in front of Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy.
Let me tell you about my Grandma.
Growing up in Essex, Missouri
Ramona Lee born in Essex, Missouri — a town in the Bootheel, population 401, where people say “Missour-uh” instead of “Missour-E.”
Youngest of the three sisters (Gwendola Floy and Jeanetta Faye) and daughter to farmers. She went to a one-room school house and helped her dad pick cotton in the harvest season.
Left: Ramona as an infant (1942); Centre: Ramona at age 3 (1945); Right: Ramona in the seventh grade (1951)
She enjoyed hanging out with her cousins, going into town and when she finally got her own room at age 15.
Her Time in University
My grandma crowned as Miss Essex in 1960, before she went to university.
After her high school graduation in 1960, she went to Southeast Missouri State University (which she calls Cape, short for the city’s name Cape Girardeau) to study Education.
A natural leader, she was elected president of her sorority Sigma Sigma Sigma. She spent her summers driving around the country, leading a crew of door-to-door magazine salespeople.
She told me this when we were talking about Baltimore, “Yeah, your Grandma went all around back in the day.”
Soon, she met Patrick Shaw when she was walking down the stairs of a campus building. He noticed her long, lean legs (that I wish I inherited).
She has always been confident enough to do things her own way. So, in her style, she eloped with Patrick in February of 1964 and then called her mom the next day. I’m sure you can imagine how that call went.
My young grandparents moved into an apartment together on campus. They were both the first to graduate from university in their families.
Ramona during her senior year of college at Southeast Missouri State University.
Motherhood
After the elopement, both of their graduations and a few teaching positions, the couple had a baby girl: Anne Catherine, my mom (1967).
1968 - Ramona and Patrick holding my infant mother and their baby girl, Anne.
A few years later, two sons arrived: Colin Micheal (1972) and a few years after that, Patrick Myles II (1974). While pregnant with my uncle Myles, she managed over 30 people at a publishing company, doing payroll, scheduling, editing the Betty Crocker cookbook in French and sending off pages about the Nixon tapes.
My grandpa took a job as an American Family insurance agent that moved them out to Cuba, Missouri. My grandma went back to teaching while raising three babies.
They went to the Methodist church every Sunday, and you best believe they did not miss a Sunday school lesson.
She made homemade pizzas, sewed princess Halloween costumes, helped the insurance business with the accounting and when she was mad, exclaimed “Damnation!” (which she still does).
Madame Shaw and her legacy
Ramona spent her career teaching high school French and German, primarily in Steelville, Missouri.
She taught them être and avoir of course, but also prepared crepes, quizzed them on the 22 regions of France and made sure they read Le Petit Prince.
In the evenings, she would spread out her grading papers on the kitchen table and audio recordings for some meticulous grading.
Left: Ramona getting her masters degree; Centre: a staff yearbook photo; Right: a Halloween costume she made as "Ra-Mona Lisa" which won her first place.
In the 90s, she started taking groups of students to Europe in the summers. They’d go to Amsterdam, London, Paris, Dijon, Lucerne, Liechtenstein, Heidelberg, Munich, Frankfurt, Innsbruck, Rome, Venice, Florence, Verona and Pisa.
On the trips, she would insist they could eat McDonald’s at home and needed to try the local cuisine. If a play popped up, she would spontaneously take them.
Some of her pupils had never even left the state of Missouri.
Now some of her students have pursued careers as translators and foreign language teachers. Some have traveled the globe.
Ramona retired in the early 2000s after taking five groups over to Europe. Ever since she has retired, her students will stop her in town and tell her how great her impact was.
How without her, they would have never seen the world.
I think showing others how big the world is, and what opportunities are out there is one of the greatest gifts you can give. Encouraging so many young kids that walked through her classroom doors to spread their wings out of Crawford County is a phenomenal legacy.
If I can inspire and help even half the amount of people Ramona has to travel internationally, I will feel very content.
Ramona Today
As I write this article, I am sitting in Ramona’s dining room. She has just celebrated her 82nd birthday and is scheming to visit me in Durham.
Last night, she had choir practice with the Methodists and tomorrow she will volunteer at the food pantry before judging a regional quilt show.
Ramona walks almost every morning with her best friend, Willa, and always sends birthday cards on time.
She is talented, intelligent, creative, classy, determined (and a little bit bossy), worldly, humble and loving, our matriarch.
My Grandma is not only my travel muse, but my muse for life.
